


Take the Wheel

by sapphire_child



Series: Season 12 Bits [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s12e06 Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox, Gen, Mary goes back to Lawrence, Post-Episode: s12e03 The Foundry, and then to Wichita to do some research, this basically dovetails into what Mary said about her recent whereabouts in 12x06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 17:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8587114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire_child/pseuds/sapphire_child
Summary: She heads east without even thinking about where she’s going. It’s freeing, finally being behind the wheel. The wind is in her hair and the sun is in her rear-view mirror and she feels lighter than she has in days. Three hours in, Mary realises that she’s automatically heading towards Lawrence.





	1. when I drive myself my light is found

She heads east without even thinking about where she’s going. It’s freeing, finally being behind the wheel. The wind is in her hair and the sun is in her rear-view mirror and she feels lighter than she has in days.

Three hours in, Mary realises that she’s automatically heading towards Lawrence.

She pulls over at a gas station that has a pay phone and she flips through John’s journal. It would probably be easier if she could just internet search for the information she wants but instead, she finds the number for the White Pages and dials. The man who picks up is about as helpful as everyone else she’s spoken to on the phone. Jeez, when did people get so damn rude?

Thankfully there’s only one psychic named Missouri living in Kansas, and it turns out she’s still in Lawrence. Once she has the address, Mary keeps on driving until she reaches her destination. The streets are shockingly familiar, little has changed in the thirty years since she last drove down through this town. She has to fight the urge to go past their old house first, just to see it. Instead, she knocks on the door of the address she’d been given and prays, just a little.

A tall, slender woman answers the door. Her tight, dark curls are braided into an exquisite pattern and she looks cross. Mary belatedly realises that its dinner time.

“Missouri Moseley?” she asks tentatively, simultaneously realising that the woman who has answered the door can’t possibly be old enough.

“Mary Winchester?” the woman returns, sceptically, and at Mary’s surprised nod she sighs and then yells back over her shoulder into the house. “Damn it all to hell ma!” she turns back and steps aside, rolling her eyes and huffing when Mary hesitates. “Well come on in then. Ain’t got no time to waste.”

Mary steps cautiously in and is immediately bustled down a hallway by the woman who introduces herself as Carol Moseley.

“I didn’t know she had…”

Carol waves a hand to silence her. “Never mind that now. You’re here to talk about your boys and ma hasn’t got that much time left. Y’all better be quick before she runs out of breath. Understand?”

The house is orderly, but reeks a little of disinfectant. The reason becomes obvious when Mary is bustled into a tidy bedroom and promptly left to her own devices. The woman in the bed has the look of a larger woman who has been ill for a long time. She has a shock of curls that could rival her daughters, save for their slate grey colour. Her face has a similar cast, even through the rich, deep colour of her skin. In contrast, her eyes are sharp, despite the constant breathy inhales she takes. A pronged plastic tube is in her nose, the tubes snaking down to a small tank beside her bed.

 _Cancer?_ Mary’s mind provides. _Emphysema?_

“Door number two.” Missouri offers dryly. “Now. Mary Winchester.” She heaves a great, wheezing cough. “Well come on now, let me take a look at you. I don’t bite.” Her laughter quickly turns into more coughs and she fumbles for the bottle of water on her bedside table. Mary steps forward to help her steady it and then sinks into the chair which has already been drawn up to the bed.

“You’ve been expecting me.” Mary says cautiously. She replaces the water bottle on the bedside table and Missouri presses a button. Her bed whirrs into life, propping her up to a sitting position.

“You bet your buttons.” She manages. “I may be dying but I sure ain’t lost any of this up here.” She taps her temple with a finger. She looks exhausted already, despite having barely said or done anything yet. “Now. There ain’t no telling how long I’ll last so we’ll have to keep this pretty quick. You came here because you wanted to talk about Sam and Dean.”

“And John.” Mary adds hesitantly.

Missouri _looks_ at her. “You really want to talk about a dead man when your sons are breathing a few towns over but you can barely stand to look at the two of them?”

The sob that punches its way out of Mary makes her entire body convulse. Missouri’s hand reaches out to pat hers and Mary vaguely realises that she’s clutching the bed spread so tightly that her knuckles are turning white.

“Listen to me.” Missouri says, and even though her voice is gentle, her tone brooks absolutely no room for arguments. “Those boys? They need you. Maybe more than anybody ever needed anybody else. I knew John for a long, long time and he loved those boys like nothin’ else alive. But the way he went about avenging your death? It was selfish, plain and simple and your kids suffered the most unbelievable trauma. Both of them.”

“I read his journal.” Mary manages to whisper. “After I died…he was in so much pain. But then the work…it’s like it just took him over.”

She meets Missouri’s gaze, and sees not pity, but sorrow. “Honey. That’s because it _did._ I doubt you’d have recognised him, last time I saw him. That man loved you so much he tore himself apart. There wasn’t much left of your John by the time he passed on.”

Mary pauses, wiping at her face while Missouri dissolves into another prolonged coughing fit. It’s several minutes before she’s able to speak again, and by then, she looks even more exhausted.

“I understand why you had to leave your babies.” Missouri sighs. “Your head is trying to understand what your heart just can’t. Either way they’re gonna need some serious lovin’ once you’re ready to go back.”

“If I go back.” Mary mutters mutinously and Missouri huffs a ragged laugh.

“Honey.” she says fondly. “You know as well as I do you’re never gonna be able to stay away from your boys. You need them almost as much as they need you.”

Mary is silent, contemplating, and Missouri takes advantage of it to begin reclining her bed again.

“Don’t give up on them just yet.” She rasps, over the whirring of the motor. “And don’t believe them if they say they’ve given up on you. Especially that Dean. Boy never says what he really means…oooh if I could get out of this bed I’d drive over to Lebanon and whack him about the ears my damn self…”

She continues to mutter until she falls into wheezing snores. As if on cue, Carol appears and steers Mary back to the front door. At the threshold she pauses, sighs, and places a hand on Mary’s shoulder.

“Excuse me for prying,” she apologises. “But when the times right, you need to those boys of yours that ma understands why they never call, but she’s still royal brassed off?”

Mary nods. Carol returns it, pats her on the shoulder, and as she shuts the door she offers her parting words.

“You oughta know, the family who moved into your house are doing just fine. Jenny and her kids are all happy and healthy. No more spirits or weird happenings and whatnot.”

The door shuts gently, leaving Mary feeling just as disconnected as before. She stays in Lawrence for a couple more days before driving on. Their old house is, indeed, fine when she drives past. The family that live there – a boy, a girl and their mom – are happy and normal.

Normal. Mary had tried so hard for normal and now it’s all blown up in her face in the worst possible way. Maybe if she’d researched demons more, or admitted to John what she was so he hadn’t been so woefully unprepared for her death…

But she didn’t.

She leaves Lawrence behind, picks a new direction, and drives.


	2. you control where you go, you can steer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Her boys had implied pretty strongly that they have no living relatives. Which is kind of baffling considering how many distant cousins Mary knows she used to have. The Campbell’s were a wide-reaching family, spanning across the United States. They can’t have all just magically disappeared._
> 
> Mary leaves Lawrence behind and heads instead to Wichita, and to the kind of traditional research she thinks she can cope with.

Mary hasn’t been to Wichita in a long time, the thirty years where she was dead notwithstanding, but she knows it well enough that she thinks she might be able to still find a library.

Her boys had implied pretty strongly that they have no living relatives. Which is kind of baffling considering how many distant cousins Mary knows she used to have. The Campbell’s were a wide-reaching family, spanning across the United States. They can’t have all just magically disappeared.

The librarian who is assigned to help her with her research seems incredibly young. A slender man with thick rimmed spectacles, a check shirt, and dark jeans that are so tight she’s surprised he can move in them at all. He has a small piece of plastic stretched through one earlobe and he’s wearing nail polish in a subtle shade of lilac. The lanyard around his neck has a nametag which reads “Alex” in a tidy font.

“I’m not really great with the whole…” Mary waves a hand at the computers when he leads her over to them. “Internet thing. Don't you have microfiche or something?”

“No problem.” Alex says smoothly. “My mom is totally useless at computers. I’ll get you up and running. Whatever you need. Five minutes tops.”

He’s not far off. Once she has explained what she’s looking for he shows her how to access the kinds of records she’s interested in. The first people she looks up, just as a test, are Sam, Dean and John. She finds a string of criminal offenses from across the continental US, a few newspaper articles and news reports, as well as their birth and death certificates. Several death certificates as it turns out, for Dean.

From there she pulls out a notepad and makes a list of all of the family and friends she knew were still alive when she died.

It doesn’t take long to figure out the linking pattern. Dead – November 1983. Dead – December 1983. Dead – January 1984. Dead – February 1984.

She trawls through record after record, adding more names as she remembers them. All of the Campbell’s that she had met and tried so hard to stay away from after her parents’ death. The friends John stayed with after the fire, the few girls from mother’s group that she was closest with. March 1984. April 1984. All dead. She feels dizzy with nausea. She keeps digging. Her doctor. Her dentist. Her OBGYN – even the damn postman. Everyone who had a connection to her – dead. Within 6 months of the fire.

She abruptly realises that she’s standing, her chair clatters to the floor behind her and the computer continues to buzz and click quietly on the desk. She realises distantly that she is hyperventilating, that her hands are shaking. The sheer _scale_ of it. The strings that must have been pulled…she must have been watched, all of those years.

The demon who killed her had eliminated anyone who had been close to her. To what – to cover its tracks? To stop John from finding out the truth?

“Ma’am?”

She snaps out of her reverie to find a terrified looking librarian staring at her from an arms-length away. Check shirt, tiny jeans. Alex. His name is Alex. The name grounds her. Mary closes her eyes, sucks in a deep slow breath, holds it and then releases it. Breathe, hold, repeat. Breathe, hold, repeat.

“…would you like some water?”

“Please?” she manages. There’s a tentative hand at her elbow and then she’s in a quiet nook and a paper cup is being pressed into her hand. Once she’s drained the water she feels marginally better. She looks up to find Alex the librarian twisting his hands together and looking worried.

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“Give me back the last thirty years of my life?” Mary retorts and Alex looks relieved at the joke.

“Not sure I can do that. I could manage a library card?”

Mary manages a small smile. “Everyone I knew is gone.” She says softly, not meaning to speak out loud. “I’m gone thirty years and everything has changed.”

“What, did you skip the country or something?” Alex asks, still trying desperately for levity. Mary knows he’s joking but she actually has a backstory prepared for this one that doesn’t involve her admitting she was resurrected by God’s sister.

“I guess you could say I was in a coma.”

Alex’s eyes widen behind his glasses. “Holy crap. I mean, sorry, wow that was real unprofessional of me but…well, you’re looking real good for someone who’s been in a coma until recently. If you don’t mind me saying so.” He gives her a slightly awkward smile and Mary is reminded, irresistibly of Castiel. “No wonder you needed a catch-up session on the computers. Thirty years ago that was…what…”

“1983.”

“Man.” Alex gives a low whistle. “I wasn’t even born until ’85. You didn’t even get to Windows.”

“Nope.” Mary goes to take a reflexive swig from her cup, forgetting that its empty. She crumples it up in her hand and pushes to her feet. “Anyway. I’d better get going. Thank you for all of your help.”

“Oh hey,” Alex leaps up too. “No problem ma’am. Glad to have been of help. Please, come back anytime.”

Mary gives him a brief smile. He insists on helping her to gather up her notepad and pens and shows her how to safely log off the computer system (“In case you come again and I’m not working”). He waves at her cheerily, still clutching her crushed paper cup, but before she leaves she hesitates.

“Your mom.” She says. “She’s bad with computers too?”

“Yeah.” He agrees. “But really, she has no excuse. She just doesn’t like them.”

Mary nods. “Next time you see her? Give her an extra hug.”

Alex just nods back, offering an indulgent smile. “Sure thing ma’am.”

“And you can tell her it’s because she raised an exceptional young man.” Mary adds, before hastening to retreat. She throws a final, “Thank you for your help!” over her shoulder as she goes and smiles when Alex waves once again.

When she’s back at the car she considers the dashboard.

She’s not sure what she was hoping to achieve with this endeavour. She’s not sure where to go next. Thumbing the clasp on John’s journal, she sits back in her chair and considers her options. But with the continental US stretching out in every direction from where she sits, Mary honestly doesn’t even know where to begin.

On impulse she takes out John’s journal and idly flicks through it. She’s already looked up most of the people and found them long dead and gone, but there’s coordinates scattered throughout it as well. Addresses. Places he’d been. She idly wonders about her own diaries, the hunters logs she kept hidden from him. She supposes they went up in the fire along with everything else.

She stops flicking, her hands pressing against the pages like she might glean some kind of peace just through touch. Some of the pages are starting to yellow, the Sellotape he used is flaking into pieces.

Mary pulls out her own notebook, props it on John’s open journal and considers her list of the dead. She has family and friends on there, but none of the people she had protected or saved on hunts. Surely some of them are still around? She pulls out her pen, considers, and begins a new list.


End file.
